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MILLER: More or less. In all of the apparatus of the Orthodox church – iconography,
certainly text and ceremony there is no change. In the babushka world, everyone has a
grandmother, the ritual, the unchanging ritual, sustained them.
Q: You might explain what the babushka is.
MILLER: Grandmothers. They were and are the keepers of memory, even in Soviet
times. They’re the ones who see to the proper baptisms, the marriages, the burials in the
church. They are the ones who tell the stories of the ancestors, including fairy tales of the
past, and they went to the churches all through the Soviet period. They were not a threat
to the state and they were somehow able to preserve the lineage of faith.
The babushka phenomenon was strong enough, so that when controls were lifted, all of
society, the grandfathers and mothers and fathers and children all went to church.
Partially, I think, because it was and is an institution of great beauty. I won’t say
entertainment, but entertainment was part of it. The music had not been suppressed
completely and the choral singing was of such high quality that the churches were filled –
absolutely filled – all the time.
Q: Where did they – there has to be a factory that produces these Russians basses. Where
do you get that deep, rumbling …
MILLER: I think it’s a mixture of caviar, sausage and vodka.
Q: It’s just remarkable and wonderful.
MILLER: I was very interested in Russian choral music, so I went to every church that
had a good choir and went to every concert that I could. That was one of the joys of being
in Moscow. It was such an open, expansive time that I never felt any fear, I must say,
during the time I lived in Moscow, anywhere in Moscow. Everyone was on the street.
Q: What about crime, though?
MILLER: There were crimes of deprivation, but people helped each other out, so it was
less evident. The crimes of the – the economic crimes that were the large thefts, the
breaking in of automobiles and shops and so on, comes later, when people became
unequal in their wealth, but at this stage everyone was poor, and everyone was sharing, to
an extent, certainly within the families.
Q: What about the Soviet military? It always struck me that they had, right from almost
the beginning, a really flawed system. They’re picking on the recruits and the brutal
treatment of recruits and the other, too many officers and not enough professional
sergeants and that sort of thing.
MILLER: That had always been the case, but there were protests, particularly by the
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